Posts from 12 December 2014

So, we had the assessment today, which last cycle suggests was one of the hardest ones we'd be seeing, and it went alright. From Sunday where I was almost in tears in frustration at the authentication model, to today, where I was not only able to complete the assessment, getting all segments to pass individually on the third try (initial write, first debug, final run) while understanding what I was doing and not just writing things from memory, was huge. I know that others were faster, but for my own sanity I have to pretend that they were just coding from memory and not thinking about what they were doing. :)

We moved on to RailsLite, which was … interesting. These problems composed of partials are a nightmare to work through, though, because so much state that would be contained in a single file normally ends up instead fragmented across multiple files, and because I personally am not good at maintaining mass state like that, by the sixth partial I was lost. No part of the model itself was particularly difficult to grasp - we spent most of the day reading WEBrick documentation or Wikipedia articles and then writing one liners that didn't make much sense in isolation…

I can't say that this project was the best use of our time, but it was nice to gain some more understanding of how a HTTP request is handled in a dynamic manner. Writing a real Rails clone from spec/scratch might have been easier, albeit not a project for a single day. Oh well.

Tomorrow, we're on to Javascript, which has some weird behaviors that I'm looking forward to learning but not looking forward to fucking up on.